Automotive vehicles are often provided with multiple doors. Typically, a pair of adjacent doors on a common body side of a vehicle open rearward facing with respect to the vehicle. Such rearward facing adjacent doors are generally each mounted to an associated body pillar. Therefore, each door is provided with a corresponding door opening.
The openings for adjacent doors may be combined into a common “pillarless” door opening. To provide lateral support to the vehicle body, generally both front and rear doors interlock and collectively provide lateral structural support. Since both front and rear doors are pivotally connected to the vehicle body, the doors are typically provided such that a user must open a front door, before opening or closing the rear door.
A proposed solution is to use a linkage for moving one door away from the other as part of the opening sequence, as shown in commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 7,488,029, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. While this arrangement solves the issue of requiring the front door to be opened before the rear door, the linkage presents a complicated arrangement requiring multiple pivot axes about which the associated door pivots during opening. This increases not only the complexity of manufacture, but also the resulting costs in terms of maintenance.
Accordingly, a need is identified for an arrangement that may allow for the selective opening of doors in a common opening that may provide the door with a single pivot axis, and which otherwise presents a simplified construction to facilitate ease of manufacture and enhanced reliability in use.